May, 1998

When I decided to buy the truck and travel trailer and hit the road, it was b/c I just didn't know what else to do. I knew I had to leave the bay area, but I didn't know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. As I may have mentioned here before, I've been on a quest for some sense of purpose and meaning in my life for a long time, and I figured that travel would at least give me a temporary illusion of purpose, as well as the space to really think through what I want. Not what can I do or what should I do, but what do I *want* to do with my life.

Working with the internet was definitely NOT it. That felt so meaningless, so trivial, and every time I got praise for building lesbian.org I felt like saying "But wait, no, that's not what I want to be known for!! I can do something far more meaningful than this!" But what, exactly? What is it that I want to do? The only conclusion I've come to thus far is one that isn't particularly surprising: I want a horse. It's something I've been denying myself for years, though for a relatively good reason: it would be impractical to get a horse until I find a place to be reasonably "settled." Horses don't travel as well as dogs!

My earliest childhood memory is of this same desire: wanting a horse. Specifically Pitty Pat, the pinto pony on which I took lessons from age five to seven. But Pitty Pat wasn't for sale, so I begged my dad to buy me another horse, and when I was eight, he relented and I got Gypsy, a sweet Appaloosa mare who followed me around with her head over my shoulder. But I wanted to train in the hunter/jumper class, and Gypsy didn't much care for jumping, so one day when I was at school my dad sold Gypsy. That night, on the phone, he told me he sold her to "the glue factory" and I cried for a week. A few months later he took me to look for another horse, one that would jump, and we found Scally, a dappled gray Connemara gelding with a steady gait and an athletic grace.

Most of my formative adolescent years were spent on Scally's strong back, most often in the company of my best friend, Lee Anne, whose chestnut Arabian, Chappy, was as flighty and skittish as Scally was solid and sure-footed. We spent hours on trails through the woods and hills, as well as in the ring, going over fences under the guidance of Roger, the trainer who would help us both achieve blue ribbon skills. When we spent the night with each other, Lee Anne and I would plan our dream farm of the future, complete with indoor riding arenas and state-of-the-art walkers and cooling pools. We read all the horse magazines, and even sent off for farm supply catalogs so we could get a head start on our orders! Unlike other girls our age, who were into rock stars and sports figures, Lee Anne and I both decorated our rooms with model horses, pictures cut out of Equus magazine and books on every aspect of the equestrian life. We'd bring home our bridles and clean them meticulously on the bedroom floor -- the smell of Murphy's oil soap still brings back those memories, like it was yesterday instead of twenty years ago.

Lee Anne and I both hoped that we would one day be good enough to try out for the US Equestrian team, but one warm summer day, after giving Scally a bath, I leaped onto his soft, slick back and urged him into a gallop. I had only the lead rope for guidance, attached to the right side of his halter, but Scally was trained to respond to the pressure of my legs and for the first few times around the paddock he paid attention. Then, as we approached the narrow part of the paddock leading towards the gate, a wind blew and Scally noticed that the gate wasn't properly shut. Unfortunately I didn't notice this, so while I leaned to the left to guide him through the narrow space and back out into the open field, Scally went to the right, through the gate and towards his stall. Scally, like a certain Beagle I know, lived for food. So I found myself unceremoniously plunked down on the warm grass, with my ankle at an awkward angle. A compound fracture, with every ligament and tendon destroyed. It took three months to heal enough that I could graduate to a walking cast, and at that point I started riding again, but once the cast came off it was clear that my left leg would never again achieve the position absolutely necessary for showing in the hunter/jumper class. For the next several years, Scally and I accompanied Lee Anne and Chappy to various shows on the circuit, but we never competed. We once rode in a Fourth of July parade, but that was the height of Scally's career as a show horse.

A year after I broke my ankle, the owner of the stables decided to sell out to a real estate developer and Lee Anne and I moved our horses across the street, to a smaller stable. We rode there for several years, but then those owners also decided to sell out, and we moved our horses yet again, Chappy to a place near Lee Anne's house, and Scally to a place that was, for reasons I still don't understand, quite far away from our house. Because I could no longer walk to the barn, and my mother was busy with her work as a real estate agent, I hardly ever got out to see Scally. The new barn was strict, too, and wouldn't allow bareback riding or riding outside of the boring old ring. All the other riders were older than I was, and not terribly friendly. After a year, just a few months short of my sixteenth birthday -- when I could've then driven out there myself to see him -- my Dad sold Scally. I didn't find out until the barn manager called to ask me what to do with my tack and trunk. I was too heartbroken to do anything, and to this day regret that I didn't go out there to pick up my stuff.

For the next five or six years I tried to put horses out of my mind. Occasionally I'd take a friend or a boyfriend up to my dad's Thoroughbred farm, which he'd moved from Kentucky to north Georgia when the prospect of legal racing opened up in Tennessee (it was later voted down). He kept a few Quarter horses for pleasure riding, so I'd introduce my friends to the fine art of horsemanship and away we'd go, but the drive was too long for me to go up there on a regular basis. When I was working on my M.Ed. degree in Charlottesville, VA, I rode my housemate's horse on occasion, and then when I moved to the north shore of Boston, I started taking lessons again. Soon I found a job training Haflingers, the national breed of Austria, on a breathtakingly beautiful little farm right on the coast in Rockport, MA. I taught English part time at a community college, and spent the rest of my time with the Haflingers, two in particular: Delta and Bianca. They were both pregnant, but adapted well to being trained for pleasure riding, though closer to her due date Bianca got incredibly bitchy. I suppose I would too if someone insisted on riding me while pregnant!

The breeders bought me a saddle and some riding gear, but other than that the only payment I received for the job was the freedom to ride whenever I wanted. And then one day, in the dead of winter, I drove up to the farm after a snowy week away and found that they'd hired someone full time to work with the horses, and hadn't even bothered to let me know. I found out when I met the new woman -- who, granted, was living in the tack room and knew an awful lot more about horse birth than I did, so in retrospect it makes sense, but at the time I was incredibly hurt. My idyllic retreat with the horses was suddenly no longer available to me, and I had no choice but to face the problems I had been escaping head-on. My job was tedious and unrewarding (they had me teaching the "five rhetorical modes of discourse," which went against the grain of everything I'd been taught about education), I was hopelessly in love with the extremely reserved British man who lived in the other room of the boarding house I lived in, and my mother was going through bankruptcy and the loss of the home I grew up in. So I gave up on horses, and didn't ride again until I organized a horseback riding trip for ba-cyberdykes in the Spring of 1995. Since then I've been riding a few times a year, on Western-style guided trail rides, but whenever I wrap my legs around a horse I feel that old familiar ache, and I know that the ride, however long it is, will be too short and too slow to satisfy me. I want my own horse!!

Now, here's part of my dilemma. There's nothing particularly meaningful about owning a horse other than that it's something I really want, and yet I am also plagued with this need to do something truly meaningful with my life, something with a purpose that extends beyond my own self-serving wants. So that means that having a horse would only be part of the larger picture, one that might include owning a small ranch -- but even then, how useful is that to the world at large? Perhaps a ranch for women only, a retreat for those who need the emotional healing that comes with working with animals? Or just for anyone who needs time away, in a peaceful mountain setting? Or perhaps a "communal living" setup for the more rural types? But where? Probably Colorado. Or possibly Wyoming, as that's where the Goodloes settled after coming over from England. But I'd also want to be within easy driving distance of a progressive urban center like Boulder, although perhaps Laramie would do. My family is from Douglas but that town doesn't exactly fit the bill!

Of course all of this will have to wait until I've recovered from the expense of the truck/trailer combo, unless I decided to sell it, or unless I suddenly find myself in the world's most high-paying teaching job! Not likely. My dad currently owns an inn in the Bahamas -- maybe I can convince him to sell it and buy a dude ranch out west! Though a dude ranch isn't exactly what I had in mind either. Sigh...